The U.S. war on terrorism has tested the resourcefulness of Army
logisticians, forcing them to improvise and to question the status
quo, officials said.
The diversity of forces deployed for the war in Afghanistan and
the difficulties in securing transportation routes have created
unexpected hurdles and may lead to changes in the way the Army prepares
and executes logistics support operations, said Maj. Gen. Wade H.
McManus Jr., head of the U.S. Army Operations Support Command, in
Rock Island, Ill.
The OSC’s parent organization, the Army Materiel Command,
is known for its expertise in logistics support and ability to supply
forces in remote corners of the world.
But the war in Afghanistan has been like no other war in terms
of “unique” logistics demands, McManus said in an interview.
More than six months into the conflict, there are questions as
to whether the Army has the “right balance of people, authority
and supplies” in the forward-operating bases, he said.
A case in point is AMC’s logistics support element (LSE)
in Kuwait, which supplies forces in Southwest Asia.
The commander of the LSE, Army Col. Ronald E. Beasley, said his
organization would benefit from more “horizontal integration”
within AMC, so that information—such as requests for supplies—is
accessible from a single database. Beasley spoke via satellite from
Kuwait during a conference of the Association of the U.S. Army.
He said that the current management structure often makes it difficult
to track the arrival and departure of units and equipment from the
theater.
McManus explained that Beasley’s problems stem from the multiplicity
of forces that AMC is supporting in this war. Traditionally, Army
logisticians plan for an operation, based on having to supply equipment
for a single type of force, such as heavy armor. The war on terrorism,
however, has required that AMC support armored, light infantry and
aviation units simultaneously. “Each requires some unique
support,” said McManus.
In this conflict, he said, “We are learning a great deal
about planning for multiple forces.”
Generally, said McManus, “When you think about employing
forces across a region, there is more homogeneity.” In the
current war, “We are not employing standard force packages.
They are tailored for specific missions,” he said. “That’s
the piece we have to adjust to.”
He shrugged off speculation that the Army was not ready to provide
the logistics support for a war that came on short notice. “It’s
not that we were not ready to do our support job,” said McManus.
But the reality is that “the war on terrorism we are fighting
today has forced us to look at tailored support structures—differently
and more rapidly than we have in the past.”
Afghanistan is a “new theater, [with] a new force structure,
with new support concepts,” said McManus. “There is
a learning curve.”
Much of the logistics support to forces in Afghanistan come from
AMC’s forward-deployed logistics center in Kuwait, commanded
by Beasley. The pre-positioned stockpile there consists of two armored
brigades and a variety of support equipment for the entire Southwest
Asia theater. Specifically, two combat-maneuver battalions, one
in Qatar and one in Kuwait, were responsible for logistics in Operation
Enduring Freedom.
The U.S. military supply line to Northern Afghanistan spans from
Dover, Del., to Germany, Turkey and, ultimately, the Karshi-Khanabad
base, in Uzbekistan, which became the main logistics hub for Northern
Afghanistan.
For Southern Afghanistan, the supply line starts in Norfolk, Va.,
and continues to Spain, Italy and Qatar, the main supply hub for
Southern Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Maj. Stephen Wade, Army quartermaster, recently completed his tour
as the commander of the Army’s logistics operations in Uzbekistan.
In his opinion, he said, logistics readiness could be improved if
there were closer coordination between the LSE and the unit it must
support. Preferably, they should be co-located in the same base,
he said at the AUSA conference.
Wade had words of praise for the Army’s Force Provider portable
housing units, which offer soldiers amenities such as air-conditioned
sleeping quarters, showers, kitchenettes and laundry machines. Each
Force Provider module houses 500 troops. The Army deployed four
modules at Karshi-Khanabad.
For the first time, Wade said, Army soldiers operated the Force
Provider, without any contractors. That meant more work for the
troops. “It’s difficult to build a city and fight a
war at the same time,” Wade said. “Force Provider is
a great piece of gear, but it’s maintenance intensive, both
in storage and in operation.”
The massive amounts of fuel consumed at U.S. bases, meanwhile,
put to the test the ability of logisticians to deliver it, no matter
what the price.
During the first seven months of the war, the Defense Logistics
Agency supplied 500 million gallons of fuel—35 million gallons
issued to the Army—in addition to 360,000 gallons of fuel
additives.
Most of the fuel came via trucks, said Jeffrey Jones, director
of DLA’s defense energy support center.
The trucks traveled from Pakistan to Army bases in Afghanistan
and Uzbekistan. “It was an interesting operation,” said
Jones. “Sometimes, it would take them 14 days to drive 20
miles.”
Getting the fuel to the Bagram Army base was a “huge challenge,”
said Jones, because it required “getting through the nest
of snakes on either side of Jalalabad.” The drivers, often
Pashtun, would be pulled out of their trucks by guards in Bagram
who typically are from the Northern Alliance, Jones said. “They
would be interrogated, beaten up, threatened. ... We had some really
interesting times getting fuel to Bagram. It’s working out,
nonetheless.”
Supplying fuel to Karshi-Khanabad, in Uzbekistan, presented a different
set of obstacles. Initially, the fuel was sold to the Army by the
Uzbek government. Eventually, Jones said, “they told us we
had to get our own, because we were consuming too much and they
couldn’t supply us.” DLA subsequently found other sources
of fuel in Russia and elsewhere in Central Asia.
The prospect of losing the lucrative Army fuel business made the
Uzbek government reconsider their offer. “The Minister of
Defense personally came out and stopped us from getting fuel from
other places,” said Jones. “It turned out that they
were making a tidy profit from supplying fuel to us. They even stopped
their own national airline to give us the fuel.”
Jones noted that U.S. forces had access to large quantities of
Russian jet fuel, left over from the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s.
“We ended up using a lot of Russian jet fuel and still are,
because it’s available,” he said. For the most part,
however, “we were able to get JP-8, our standard fuel.”